Unicode restoration and ASCII comparison
Tezcatlipōca
The name survives only in scholarly transliteration. Tezcatlipōca is the standard Nahuatl romanisation, documented in academic sources — “Smoking mirror”. Its macron-length vowels preserve distinctions lost in plain ASCII.
No indigenous writing system is securely attested for individual nahuatl names. The form shown is a modern scholarly transliteration.
tezcatlipoca
Reduced to plain tezcatlipoca, the name loses everything that made it specific: macron-length vowels. What remains is an ASCII string that machines can parse but that no longer speaks with its original voice.
Tezcatlipōca
The Unicode restoration recovers what ASCII flattened. Tezcatlipōca restores macron-length vowels, returning the name to its original written dignity. The domain encodes to Punycode, but the browser displays the truth.
Tezcatlipōca.com → xn--tezcatlipca-t9b.com
The non-ASCII characters in Tezcatlipōca are encoded while the ASCII remains visible. To the DNS, it is Punycode. To humanity, it is Tezcatlipōca.
How Tezcatlipōca is preserved in writing
No indigenous writing system is securely attested for individual nahuatl names. The form shown is a modern scholarly transliteration.
Contribute scholarly provenance →How Tezcatlipōca was spoken
Night, Sorcery, Strife, and the God-Impersonator
Tezcatlipōca is the Aztec night given will: the god of the obsidian mirror in which all things are seen, patron of rulers and sorcerers, tempter and destroyer of his own brother Quetzalcōātl. He is not evil — he is the shadow the world requires, and the Aztecs honoured him with their most terrible beauty: the year-long god made flesh.
Obsidian polished to black glass: it shows the future, the hidden, and the viewer's true face.
Torn off by the earth-monster Cipactli in the creation — the mirror smokes where the foot was.
He was the sun of the first age — the jaguar sun — devoured with his world when it ended.
At Toxcatl, a flawless youth lived as the god for a year — then climbed the temple steps to die as him.
Stories of Tezcatlipōca
Tezcatlipōca's myths are all contest: with the earth-monster, with Quetzalcōātl, with the proud — he is the force that measures the strong by breaking them.
To make the world, Tezcatlipōca and Quetzalcōātl descended to the primordial waters where the caiman-monster Cipactli floated, all mouths. He offered his own foot as bait; the monster bit it off, and the two gods tore Cipactli apart — her body becoming the earth, her eyes the springs, her mouth the cave of creation. Every Aztec king thereafter ruled over ground purchased with the god's flesh.
Tezcatlipōca was the first sun, Nahui Ocēlōtl, "Four Jaguar": his world of giants ended when Quetzalcōātl struck him from the sky, and jaguars devoured the people. Through the succession of suns the two brothers keep unmaking each other's worlds — the Aztec cosmos is their long quarrel, and the present fifth sun is only the latest armistice, held together by sacrifice.
Against Quetzalcōātl of Tōllān he came as a sorcerer: he showed the plumed god his true aged face in a mirror ("look at your flesh, lord"), tricked him into drunkenness and incest with his own sister, until the shamed god-king burned his palace and departed eastward on a raft of serpents. The Aztecs read the myth as history's engine: Tezcatlipōca destroys every golden age, and awaits it at the next shore.
Each year the Aztecs chose a flawless captive youth to be the ixiptla — the god's living image. For a year he walked as Tezcatlipōca: taught, adorned, honoured with four goddesses as wives. At the feast of Toxcatl he climbed the temple steps breaking his flutes one by one, and was offered at the summit — the most beautiful death in the Aztec year, and the empire's meditation on how divinity wears, and discards, the flesh.
Tezcatlipōca is the god of the honest mirror. He flatters no one: he shows the king his age, the golden age its end, the world its price. Every tradition needs a power that tests rather than comforts; the Aztecs gave him their most beautiful ceremonies, understanding that what breaks you falsely was never yours — and what survives the mirror is.
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